Much of teaching and learning is based around the creation and digestion of documents. We write many worksheets, exams, presentations, emails, polls, etc for students to learn from, so it’s important that these documents be accessible to the students. I don’t just mean accessible in the sense of making the classroom inclusive to everyone, but also in the sense of being easy to access and interact with. Here are some points about accessibility to consider when creating documents for a class.
This page was last updated 29 November 2019.
About one in 12 men and one in 200 women have some form of color blindness. In particular this means that your average 20–30 person class will very likely have a color blind student. Because of this, you should be using a color blind accessible color palette when designing graphics or materials for your class. A popular choice is Bang Wong’s conservative 7-color palette from Points of view: Color blindness.
There’s also these nice 12-color and 15-color palettes by Martin Krzywinski. I write most of my class documents in LaTeX, so I’ve redefined most of the standard colors in LaTeX based on an amalgamation of Paul Tol’s vibrant and muted colors palettes (figures 3 and 4):
\RequirePackage{xcolor}
\definecolor{purple}{HTML}{332288}
\definecolor{blue}{HTML}{0077BB} %*
\definecolor{cyan}{HTML}{88CCEE}
\definecolor{teal}{HTML}{44AA99}
\definecolor{green}{HTML}{117733}
\definecolor{olive}{HTML}{999933}
\definecolor{yellow}{HTML}{DDCC77}
\definecolor{orange}{HTML}{EE7733} %*
\definecolor{pink}{HTML}{CC6677}
\definecolor{red}{HTML}{CC3311} %*
\definecolor{brown}{HTML}{882255}
\definecolor{violet}{HTML}{AA4499}
\definecolor{magenta}{HTML}{EE3377} %*
The starred (%*) colors are vibrant, and so might collide with the other colors, which are muted. But overall this palette looks pretty good. I’ve written up a few more of these accessible colors palettes for LaTeX in the file accessible-colors.tex that you may use. And if you need to get your hands dirty designing graphics and you need more colors, be sure to use a color-blindness simulator like Color Oracle or this tool made by David Nichols to test your design choices for visibility. For resources and more reading on color blindness in general, see
By immutable documents I mean documents like the course syllabus, a course outline, an exercise sheet: any document that you intend for the students to either print or read, and not to digitally edit. Any such document your create should be given to students as a PDF; stop posting your class syllabus as a Microsoft Word .docx file.
There are two points on accessibility to be touched on here. First, PDF files are more convenient to deal with than most other file types. They can be opened in any web browser or any one of many free PDF viewers. They can be viewed easily on a phone. They have all the typesetting information of the document embedded in the file so that the document is guaranteed to look the same regardless of what’s installed on the device that opens it.
Second, PDF documents can be given additional structural information to make them more accessible to the visually impaired. The idea here is that PDF documents can have tags that encode what certain elements of the PDF are (headings, lists, body-text, etc) and what order they are intended to be read in. A visually impaired person using a screen reader needs this information to read your document efficiently.
To make tagged PDFs from Microsoft Office documents, you just have to format your document correctly and then Export to PDF (do not Print to PDF). I’ll refer you to the University of Washington’s Wonderful Guide to Creating Accessible Documents for more details on this. Creating tagged PDFs from LaTeX is a bit more complicated. You could do this by using ConTeXt or by including R and Adobe Acrobat in your TeX workflow, but those options are not convenient. It looks like our best hope for an easy solution is the accessibility.sty package that was recently put on CTAN, but that package still has many issues. I’ll update this page as I learn more about making accessible PDFs from LaTeX. Note too that you’ll need to include the package axessibility.sty separately to set up tags on mathematical formulas. For further reading, see
You’re asking the students to read your document. You want them to read it. It’s only polite that you make the job of reading your document as easy as possible. The layout of text on the page should, at the very least, not get in the way of the content of the document, and this is why good typography, or really why avoiding bad typography, is important.
But learning the best typographic techniques and practices is a deep rabbit hole one could dive into. If you’re interested, I recommend looking at Butterick’s Practical Typography. But since you probably don’t have time for that, I’ll synthesize some of the important considerations here.
Butterick describes how to enact these considerations in Word or in CSS. If you use LaTeX, here’s a some lines you could add to your preamble that will make your document reflect these guidelines:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{geometry}
\geometry{margin=1.67in, top=1.67in, bottom=1.33in}
\usepackage{fourier}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\hypersetup{%
pdfauthor={YOUR NAME}%
,pdftitle={DOCUMENT TITLE}%
,pdflang=en-US%
,colorlinks=true%
,urlcolor=blue%
}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\lhead{YOUR NAME}
\rhead{DOCUMENT TITLE}
\cfoot{\thepage}
\usepackage{microtype}
\usepackage{parskip}
\usepackage[all]{nowidow}
\usepackage{setspace}
\linespread{1.167}
\frenchspacing
For more reading on typography,
The file name of a document should leave it unambiguous
to a student what that document is.
Something like Author-DescriptiveTitleOfDocument.pdf
works just fine. Maybe include a year.
I feel compelled to make this a point after seeing too many examples
of poorly named files like
syllabus.pdf (syllabus for which class?
students have multiple classes), or crap like
Copy of scanned_PAGES69-111 \(2\).docx.pdf.
Furthermore don’t use spaces in your file names because that
can be inconvenient.
Instead you should separate different words in your file names
with a hyphen or an underscore, or simply use
camelCase.
We very often have to make a poll to set up common meeting time for a group of people, and that pole always asks "When are you available to meet?" This is the wrong question. It should be "When are you unavailable to meet?" Maximizing convenience is not the same as minimizing inconvenience, and when establishing a meeting time you need only to do the latter. Furthermore, the unavailability question is easier to answer because everyone needs only to respond with their schedule and not some complement of their schedule.
If you’re creating a document that could conceivably be printed by a student, make sure any URL in the document is convenient to type. Use a URL shortener if you need to. If you’re sending students a URL in a non-print format, like in an email or on a webpage, hide the URL behind a descriptive link like I’ve done with all the links on this webpage. This is necessary because URLs are ugly and typographically distracting.
When you give a presentation with
beamer,
pauses while each bullet point appears on a slide one-by-one is great.
When you post the hundred page PDF of the slides online
for students to supposedly scroll through and read,
these pauses are a nightmare.
Before posting your beamer slides online,
please recompile it with the handout option:
\documentclass[handout]{beamer}